xoJane - Meghan Ohttp://www.xojane.com/author/meghan-o
enCopyright 2015 Say Media, Inc.http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssTue, 03 Mar 2015 10:51:23 -0800Why I Loved Being a YMCA Indian Guide (Even Though It Was Pretty Racist)<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb8f5ef001a048"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODUxMDUyMDYyMjIwMzYw.jpg" /></figure></div><p></p><p>Hi! This is me holding a flashlight (I have three in my room) and a silver dagger (I have two in my room).</p><p>&nbsp;I hated being a Girl Scout.</p><p>I realize that when most people say they hated doing some activity as a child, they’re probably being overdramatic. They’re probably forgetting the valuable friendships they forged and life lessons they learned. I’ll admit that when I say “I hated field hockey,” what I mean is I hated sweating during the cardiovascular workouts and feeling sore the next day when I had to do it all again. I liked being on a team and I liked my teammates.</p><p>When I say that I hated being a Girl Scout, I mean that every single memory of my one year of being a Brownie fills me with rage.</p><p>When you’re seven years old, you shouldn’t be able to point out to your mother the ways in which an organization is sexist, but I could. I remember when we went to the scout section of Woolworths to pick up my Brownie swag. I passed mess kits and swiss army knives and books about surviving in the wild.&nbsp;</p><p>My mom pushed me past those, explaining, “Oh, those for the Boy Scouts.”&nbsp;</p><p>“Why?” I asked.</p><p>“Well…I don’t know. They go camping in the woods.”&nbsp;</p><p>“But we’re supposed to go camping in the woods, too,” I retorted.&nbsp;</p><p>As it turns out camping in the woods when you’re a Brownie meant staying in a fancy lodge overnight. We were taught to avoid poison ivy and how to make lanyards, which are useful in the wild, but not as helpful as how to read a compass or make fire.&nbsp;</p><p>It wasn’t just the camping, though. For my mathematics badge, I had to guess the amount of jelly beans in a jar. That’s all. That was my mathematics and accounting badge.</p><p>Oh, and because I started Brownies in the third grade (because we were supposed to move when I was in first grade, but then my father suddenly passed away, so we didn’t do anything at all new while I was in second grade), the girls … well … there’s no other way to say it except to say the girls were very mean to me for no better reason than they knew they could be. It wasn’t my first experience with catty girl behavior, but it was my first time experiencing it in an environment that was touted as being “supportive” to young women.</p><p>I’m not saying all Girl Scout troops were like this, but the one I was involved with was. The reason why I’m talking so long about how much I personally hated this particular band of Girl Scouts is so I can explain the reasons why I loved being a YMCA Indian Guide*.</p><p>So, yeah…about the YMCA Indian Guides.</p><p>There’s no other way to put this than to fully admit up top that as a youth organization founded in the early 20th century by white people, it’s…um…racist.</p><p>Of course, it’s not racist in the nefarious “Let’s deny Native American their lands, lives and civil liberties” sort of way. It’s racist in that “Let’s encourage suburban white kids to wear feather headdresses and beat drums and call themselves ‘Indians’” sort of way.&nbsp;</p><p>I would love to say that as a fourth grader, I was completely innocent to the abhorrent racial stereotyping that the Indian Guides encouraged. Except I wasn’t.&nbsp;</p><p>Just as I was preternaturally sensitive to the Boy Scout/Girl Scout inequities in Woolworths, I remember feeling incredible unease as my mother handed me my feather headband, my felt “corn calendar” and gushed that soon we’d have to give ourselves “Native American” names.</p><p>“Um, are we allowed to do that? We’re not Indian. We’re Irish,” I asked her, sitting cross legged on her bedroom floor.</p><p>“Of course! It’s part of being an Indian Guide!”</p><p>Even though I was already questioning authority, I was still at the age when I willfully accepted authority’s simple answers. So, I gleefully dressed up like a Native American, named myself “Dancing Moon” and showed up to my first powwow. I say I did this all “gleefully,” because it was really a lot of fun.&nbsp;</p><p>I got to spend time with a group of boys and one other awesome, spunky girl where I was allowed to explore whatever I wanted. &nbsp;We went on nature hikes and looked at arrowheads, watched films and made homemade popcorn and did a variety of crafts that boys and girls could enjoy.&nbsp;</p><p>My most vivid memory of being an Indian Guide was the very first powwow my mother and I attended. One parent and child has to organize the night for everyone else. That night the father organizing the crafts knew ahead of time that two girls would be in attendance. He had planned on just teaching the boys how to stamp leather so he got a bunch of plain leather bracelets and stamps. He also added few coin purses with ornate floral stamps for me and the other girl.&nbsp;</p><p>The thing I’ll never forget was that he gave us girls the choice of doing what the boys were doing, doing the fancy feminine version of the project, or both. I did both and came home with a sweet leather bracelet that I’d stamped and a flowery coin purse. &nbsp;I can’t honestly remember if any of the boys protested or wanted to make a purse as well (I think one of them might have), but I don’t think it would have been a problem.</p><p>Basically, unlike the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, the YMCA Indian Guides thought that boys and girls should play together -- and that if there were gender-specific themes in their crafts and games, that it would be up to the child to decide if he or she wanted to conform to it or not.</p><p>The bottom line of all this is that it would be great if there was some kind of organization out there that could teach boys and girls to work together while learning useful technical skills and participating in outdoor activities -- that didn’t also involve offensive cultural kitsch.&nbsp;</p><p>If I ever have sons or daughters, I want them to be lucky enough to be exposed to everything I was. I want them to know about battlefields and beauty products, stitching samplers and shooting guns, how to take the subway in France and how to milk a cow. And I want them to decide for themselves what interests them the most without feeling as though their passions have anything to do with gender.</p><p>*Technically, I wasn’t an Indian Guide. Technically, I was an Indian Maiden. The Indian Guides started off as a father-son bonding group, but by the end of the 20th century was open to all parent-child combinations. Indian Guides are what boys who are there with their fathers are called. A girl with her father is called an Indian Princess. Because my mom was there, I was an Indian Maiden. I’d complain about this, but it never came up within the actual group. Unlike the Girl Scouts where I was penalized for starting late and there were loads of badges and internal honors, no one in the Indian Guides really gave two flying eagle fucks about your backstory. Which is why I loved it.</p>Basically, unlike the Boy and Girl Scouts of America, the YMCA Indian Guides thought that boys and girls should play together -- and that if there were gender-specific themes in their crafts and games, that it would be up to the child to decide if he or she wanted to conform to it or not.http://www.xojane.com/relationships/why-i-loved-being-ymca-indian-guide
http://www.xojane.com/relationships/why-i-loved-being-ymca-indian-guideRelationshipsWed, 06 Jun 2012 12:00:48 -0700Meghan OIt Happened to Me: I Have Psoriasis<!-- tml-version="2" --><p>It all started with a bottle of Winnie the Pooh shampoo.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb8f400001c80a"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODUwOTE5MTg2NzMyMzA2.jpg" /></figure></div><p>My older sister was out shopping one day and saw Winnie the Pooh branded shampoo and thought it was adorable. The bottle was wrapped to look like Pooh Bear’s body and the cap was a plastic mold of his head. There was also a Tigger Conditioner to match.&nbsp;</p><p>My sister Colleen has always been obsessed with her hair, so she already had an entire bath tub’s worth of fancy salon branded products specially designed to make her hair flatter or curlier or bouncier depending upon her mood. She couldn’t add drug store brand baby shampoo to that specially formulated cocktail of hair products, but she also couldn’t resist the charms of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, too.&nbsp;</p><p>So, naturally, being that I was the 10-year-old kid sister at home, I got the Winnie-the-Pooh shampoo and I was in love with it.&nbsp;</p><p>Then, after a few washings with it, I began to notice white, itchy flakes on my scalp.</p><p>My family just assumed I wasn’t washing my hair properly. To be fair to them, I was a pretty slovenly kid. I was more into reading historical novels than combing the knots out of my hair, so it was logical to think I also wasn’t washing my hair enough -- or that I was using the wrong shampoo -- or that I had dandruff.</p><p>So, my mom bought me Shop Rite brand Head and Shoulders and I dutifully washed my hair with it. I remember being so excited to be taking care of my presumed dandruff like one of the grown ups in the Head and Shoulders commercials.&nbsp;</p><p>The flakes got worse. There were more of them, they itched more, and when I scratched them off, little sores opened all over my scalp. I was mortified.</p><p>When we went to our local hair salon, I received lectures about how I wasn’t washing out my shampoo well enough. I could see my stylist wince in disgust as she parted my hair and tiny flakes and sores and scabs were everywhere. It was all my fault and I needed to figure out a way to fix it.</p><p>Then one fateful day when I was 15, my mom was sitting next to me on the couch and as she watched me pull little itchy flakes of skin through and off individual strands of my hair*, she got a weird look on her face. “Oh,” she said, “you know something? I think your dad had the same thing you have with your scalp.”</p><p>“WHAT?” I said.</p><p>“Yeah, I’ll take you to my dermatologist. It’s dermatitis or psoriasis or something. I think one of your uncles has it, too.”</p><p>“WHAT?” I demanded.</p><p>“It’s genetic,” she answered simply.</p><p>For five long embarrassing years (arguably the five most long and embarrassing years of any female’s life), I had been told that the reason my scalp shed gross white flakes all over everything was because I was a dirty little girl who couldn’t wash her hair properly. Now, I discovered it was an undiagnosed genetically transmitted skin disease.</p><p>Words can not express how much I wanted to punch the world.&nbsp;</p><p>I didn’t punch anyone, though. I can’t remember what I did. I think I probably put on a slightly less adorable cardigan and played No Doubt’s “Just A Girl” on repeat for an hour.</p><p>When you have any sort of disease, identifying it is the first hurdle and then living with the diagnosis is the second.&nbsp;</p><p>Psoriasis is a genetic disorder that affects how skin cells form. Basically, most skin cells take almost a month to grow, live on the surface of your skin and then die. If you have psoriasis, your skin cells repeat this pattern in a matter of two to three days. This means &nbsp;the skin cells grow on top of each other in plaques and then when they flake off, the skin underneath isn’t always ready to be exposed yet, so it’s raw and sometimes a plain open sore.</p><p>I once developed a few tiny plaques on my thigh when I was 17 and consulted my mother’s 1970’s medical books for visual reference on full body cases. &nbsp;When I saw a photograph of a particularly gruesome case, I threw the book across the room and had a panic attack. While I was being extremely vain, there are some people who suffer from extreme forms of psoriasis that keep them bedridden and in constant pain. I’m lucky enough to not be one of those people, but now there are injections and other forms of medication to control this and eliminate it entirely.</p><p>If you’ve ever wondered why Leann Rimes seems so in love with wearing bikinis all the time now, it’s not just because she lost a lot of weight. She had full-limb psoriasis as a teen and felt the need to cover up her entire body growing up. Now, that she’s on medication, she has “normal” skin. The first thing I ever did as a teen when I finally got a cream to help with the sores I had on my hair line was to pull my bangs off my forehead. Just saying it’s totally the same thing.</p><p>Anyway, I’m one of the lucky ones who only has a mild form of psoriasis that’s on my scalp, hair line and occasionally around my ears. I spent my teens playing with various medicated shampoo, cream and foam cocktails designed by my dermatologist to sooth my scalp. Nizoral helped the most, but then my hair smelled like tar and had the softness of a Brillo pad.&nbsp;</p><p>Since then, I’ve figured out which over the counter remedies work the best: Cortozone cream and <a href="http://www.lushusa.com/Dream-Cream/00031,en_US,pd.html">Lush’s Dream Cream </a>work the best to sooth and get rid of plaques around my hair line. I can’t use drug store shampoos unless they are sulfate-free because of the harsh mineral oils and chemicals that manufacturers pump into them.&nbsp;</p><p>Every time I visit a new hair stylist, I have to feel a swell of nerves as they comb through my hair and massage my scalp. I used to apologize ahead of time for having a skin condition. Then, a few years ago, I stopped saying anything at all. I figured they were professionals and therefore just had to deal with it. I mean, I mention it if my hair is getting colored just so they know to be gentle, but in general, the stylists I’ve had as an adult have never had an issue with that.</p><p>The biggest thing I’ve learned though is to just, well, accept it. The more I obsessed over picking and at scratching my psoriasis, the worst it got. Also, my psoriasis gets a lot worse when I’m tense, so the calmer I am, the better.&nbsp;</p><p>What made me hate having it for so long was the feeling that I was gross or ugly to other people. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to like myself more. I’ve learned to surround myself with friends (and hair stylists) who don’t get wigged out by the fact that I have a genetic skin disorder. I’ve learned to manage it as it relates to my health and forget it as it relates to my vanity.</p><p>Also, thanks to psoriasis, I’m really, really, really good at washing my hair. Like, I’m fantastic at it. So, let me know if you ever need tips.</p><p>*When psoriasis plaques grow on the scalp, it’s often around the hair follicle, so even if they flake off, sometimes they don’t fall off your head because they’ve grown in a ring around a strand of hair. The best way to make sure they get off your head is to carefully hold them between your nails and slide them off the entire strand of hair. Yes, it is gross.&nbsp;</p>For five long embarrassing years, I had been told that the reason my scalp shed gross white flakes all over everything was because I was a dirty little girl. Now, I discovered it was an undiagnosed genetically transmitted skin disease.http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/psoriasis-treatment
http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/psoriasis-treatmentIt Happened To MeWed, 30 May 2012 13:00:25 -0700Meghan OOn Watching HBO Shows With My Mom<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb909d6001c80a"><figure><img src="http://a1.files.xojane.com/image/upload/MTI0ODUyNDE5NzQwODY1ODEw.gif" /></figure></div><p></p><p>My mom: "OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD JOFFREY JOFFREY JOFFREY."</p><p>I watch HBO with my mom. I don’t think this is a particularly big deal. I mean, I like watching quality television and she likes watching quality television. It just so happens that the quality television that we both like watching happens to encompass shows like "Game of Thrones," where there’s a lot of violence, and even more sex.</p><p>I suppose the reason why we’re OK with watching the show on Sunday nights and then immediately calling each other up to discuss what just happened is because we have a long history of discussing “mature” topics.</p><p>Some of my best memories growing up are going to rated R films with my mom in my tweens. This isn't because I got some naughty glee out of my mother “corrupting” me. It's because "Saving Private Ryan" and "Shakespeare in Love" were really good films. I was a little 13-year-old culture snob and I was psyched to get to finally get to see these films in the theater. I was doubly psyched that my mom thought I was mature enough to handle it.</p><p>You may ask how my mother knew that I was old enough to handle the visceral Normandy beach scene or Gwyneth Paltrow's breasts. I actually don't think she knew if I could handle it or not. That's why she made the rule that if I was going to watch a rated R film, I'd have to see it with her.</p><p>I do remember feeling twinges of adolescent embarrassment during the sex scenes. I’d blush and glance sideways at her face to see if she could tell how intrigued I was about sex.</p><p>She would always stare right back at me with a similar “Oh! Is this really happening? Should we feel embarrassed? It’s just sex, right? Should we feel embarrassed?” face.</p><p>By and large, though, I remember chomping gleefully on a handful of SweetTarts and getting enraptured in each and every film we saw together in the theaters. And I remember driving in the car home from the movie theater, openly discussing what I’d just seen (the good, bad and the horrifying) with my mother.</p><p>For a long time, I thought the reason why my mom chose to do this was to expose me to adult themes while letting me feel safe in forming my own informed opinions about them. Years later, she’d reveal that the only reason she took me to these movies was because she wanted to see them but couldn’t afford to hire a sitter or find a friend who shared her taste in cinema.</p><p>And that's how my mom and I fell into the type of mother-daughter relationship where we can jokingly chat about siblings having anal with each other on a Sunday night.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb909d9003a048"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.xojane.com/image/upload/MTI0ODUyNDIwMjc3NzM2NzIy.gif" /></figure></div><p></p><p>My mom: "She’s willing to have a threesome with him and her brother. That’s very thoughtful of her."</p><p>I coerced my mom into watching "Game of Thrones" last year because having read all of books I knew it would be the only thing that could fill the void that Rome’s cancelation left in her heart.</p><p>Her response to the show was hilarious. She called Daenerys “the Albino chick” and declared that Tyrion Lannister was “a hunk.” I giggled as I told one of my best comedian pals, Jake Young, about it and he immediately stopped and said, “You know that’s a Tumblr, right?”</p><p>So, I started a blog called <a href="mymomwatchesgameofthrones.tumblr.com">My Mom Watches Game of Thrones </a>and overnight it garnered hundreds of followers, and then a few weeks later, thousands. Now I have this weird double life where I blog about myself by day and then transcribe my mother’s television commentary for an even larger audience by night.</p><p>Because the Internet now knows that we watch brothel scenes and beheadings as mother-daughter bonding time, I’ve had to start examining why this is even weird. A lot of people who read the blog have reached out to me to bluntly ask, "Aren’t you uncomfortable with your mom watching an HBO show?" To which, I have to ask back, "Why should I be uncomfortable with my mom watching an HBO show?"</p><p>Look, I'm not going to deny that Game of Thrones is adult programming, but my mother was an adult before I was born. She has worked in a hospital. She has seen dead and mutilated bodies up close. She has made and delivered babies. I think she can handle a fictional program set in a world where dragons are real. I have a very high opinion of my mother’s maturity level.</p><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb909db0039512"><figure><img src="http://a4.files.xojane.com/image/upload/MTI0ODUyNDIxMDgzMDQzMDkw.gif" /></figure></div><p></p><p>My mom: "She couldn’t possibly be giving birth to Stannis’s child. There’s no time! THIS IS BAD. OH. MELISANDRE IS BAD."</p><p>The second question I get is "Aren’t you uncomfortable with your mom knowing you’re watching an HBO show?" To which, I again ask back, "Why should I be?"</p><p>Look, my mother knows I’m an adult. She's knows I'm an adult who can handle her shit because she's the one who raised me to adulthood. She knows that if I see people behave morally reprehensible or foolishly on television, that I’m wise enough not to copy those behaviors. She has a very high opinion of my maturity level.</p><p>Boobs are boobs, sex is sex, curse words are just words, and violence has always happened. I shouldn’t feel some sort of embarrassment for knowing that these things exist and my mom wouldn’t know me at all if she didn’t already know that I know these things exists. As I said before, it’s not a big deal.</p><p>That said, when I was 16, we rented "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and we couldn’t get through the first half hour without blushing, giggling nervously, turning the film off and promising to forget that the explicit oral sex scene ever happened. So, maybe it’s kind of a tiny deal. Not a big deal, but a tiny one.</p>How my mom and I fell into the type of mother-daughter relationship where we can jokingly chat about siblings having anal with each other on a Sunday night.http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/watching-hbo-shows-my-mom
http://www.xojane.com/entertainment/watching-hbo-shows-my-momEntertainmentTue, 22 May 2012 08:00:25 -0700Meghan OI've Got Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: Here's How I Deal With It<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb9097d001efe2"><figure><img src="http://a2.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI0ODUyMzk1ODUwMTMzNDc0.png" /></figure></div><p>Like a lot of <a href="http://www.xojane.com/healthy/panic-attacks-cure">brilliant</a>, <a href="http://www.xojane.com/healthy/why-wont-doctors-treat-my-problem-periods">funny</a>, <a href="http://www.xojane.com/healthy/rage-uhauls-and-broken-plates-pms-and-me">wonderfully creative</a> women, I suffer from anxiety and depression. Also like a lot of brilliant, funny, wonderfully creative women, my particular strains of anxiety and depression have been diagnosed as a bunch of different things over the years. In middle school, I was told I just hadn’t adjusted to my father’s death appropriately. In high school, I was told I was having panic attacks about college applications. In college, I was told that I suffered from anxiety brought on by misfiring synapses. After college, my doctor finally noticed that my panic attacks and depressive mood swings only happened once a month. So, instead of throwing another SSRI at me (I was already hooked on one thanks to the college docs), my doctor gave me a fun form to fill out as homework. I had to mark my general mood every day on a scale from 1 to 5 every day for three months. On the same form, I needed to mark when my ever-unpredictable periods began and ended. It was fun homework. It was like doing dittos in first grade. Except instead of learning how to add numbers, I was counting the ways my hormones were making me go crazy.At the end of three months, it was clear that there was a method to my so-called madness.Basically, I fall into an almost personality-changing depression for 1-3 days each month right before my period. I was officially diagnosed with PMDD.There's a few marked differences between PMS and PMDD. As I understand it (and I could be very wrong since I’m not a medical professional), PMS is a slow-burning caldron of discomfort the week before and during one's period. Bloating, headaches, fatigue, liquids appearing on one’s panties... I get many of these symptoms, too.PMDD, however, usually just happens in the day or two before you get your menstrual flow and can carry you straight to the type of crazy town where you can actually want to hurt yourself. When I'm a day before my period, it’s not just that I’m cranky and bloated. I feel very much as though a depression demon has crawled its way into my chest. My breathing is tighter. My mood is darker. I constantly feel on the verge of tears or a panic attack even though everything in my life is going hunky-dory. Typical thoughts during this time include honestly believing that no one in the world loves or acknowledges me, or that I'll die alone, or that the movie theater I'm sitting in will probably be bombed mid-feature, or that the girl who was mean to me in sixth grade deserves to be punched because she’s evil, or that it would be fun to jump in front of a moving train, or that no other single person has ever felt as sad as me -- except for Morrissey.These thoughts aren’t my own. The thoughts I usually have are about how I want to marry a British character actor, how I want to get better at comedy and how cool it would be to time travel. &nbsp;The negative thoughts and feelings I have right before my period aren’t my own. They’re just side effects of having PMDD.It might seem disenfranchising to say, "My feelings right now aren't real and should be disregarded because I have women's troubles." Actually, it's absolutely disenfranchising. Part of being a human being is validating ourselves. We need to assert our identities by celebrating our needs, wants, opinions and emotions. My mind determines my reality and if my mind is telling me that I feel a certain way, then the point is I feel a certain way. When I’m depressed the day before my period, I am actually depressed.However, one of the best ways I've found that I can fight my PMDD symptoms is to remind myself that those emotions aren't "real." You can't win a fight against you -- you'll just get caught in a "Why are you hitting yourself?" loop. I have to look at that temporary depression as "an other" in my body that I have to beat back into a cage with deep breaths, exercise, nutrition, silly mantras and occasional prescribed pharmaceutical use.I like to think of it like an emotional mirage. We all know the classic trope: a band of adventurers is wandering in the desert. They've had no food or water for days. They are exhausted and about to collapse due to the oppressive heat. Their malnutrition mixes with a few tricks of the light, and they believe that an oasis is in front of them. Everything in their brain is telling them that an oasis exists, so that should be their reality, but it's not actually real.When you have PMDD, you can be in an awesome emotional place, and then one day that happiness is snuffed out like a candle. You get this whammy of anxiety and depression and your brain actually invents logical reasons for you to suddenly be suffering so much. It's an emotional mirage. Your brain is telling you that you are sad and angry, but there's really no outside reason for that to be. Like, OK ... you're having a bad hair day. Your friend was 15 minutes late to hang out with you. Your co-worker gave you a fake smile when you said, “Hello.”</p><p>Under normal circumstances, I would laugh all of these things off. Within the PMDD mirage, they are causes for me to want to hurt myself emotionally and physically.</p><p>I think that’s the trickiest part of PMDD. Even though I was taught that being a woman meant I was strong and could conquer anything, it's hard, because what I see as my biggest, most crippling weakness -- the feelings I can't control -- only exist because I’m a woman. It's important that I let myself separate my body and hormones from the rest of me.</p><p>Whenever I’m in any sort of bad mood, I turn into a petulant little kid and I call my mom for support. The first thing she always asks when she hears the catch of tension in my throat on the other end of the line is, "What time of the month is it?" Even though that phrase has been used countless times in our culture to disenfranchise the feelings of women, she never says it to be dismissive of me. She’s simply giving the logical, reasoning side of my brain a wake-up call.&nbsp; The good news is that because I’ve finally been diagnosed correctly, I’ve been able to conquer the shit out of my sadness. The bad news is, of course, every month the sadness rushes back.</p>You can't win a fight against your own body, friends.http://www.xojane.com/healthy/premenstrual-dysphoric-disorder-pmdd
http://www.xojane.com/healthy/premenstrual-dysphoric-disorder-pmddHealthyMon, 21 May 2012 09:30:21 -0700Meghan OI’m Afraid I’m a Manic Pixie Dream Girl <!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb9ad450012a83"><figure><img src="http://a5.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,dpr_1.0,q_80,w_620/MTI0ODYzNjUwODExOTEyMjY0.jpg" /></figure></div><p>In case you’ve been off the Internet for a few years, a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” is a trope character in films who exists solely to be a love interest for a sensitive, directionless and/or depressed man. You can spot them because they usually “have eccentric personality quirks and are unabashedly girlish.”&nbsp; (I did some crazy in-depth research for this on Wikipedia.) They also usually have commitment issues that are somehow related to death or illness. Zooey Deschanel, Kirsten Dunst and Natalie Portman usually play them. They are annoying.</p><p>Hi! I’m an unabashedly girlish young woman with eccentric personality quirks (e.g., I start my day by dancing for 15 minutes and own a panda hat.) Most men who fall for me are sensitive, directionless and/or depressed. I find it really hard to emotionally commit to boys beyond a first date because my dad died suddenly of a brain aneurysm when I was six years old. A little boy in Bath &amp; Body Works once told me that I looked like Kirsten Dunst. I am annoying.</p><p>A few years ago I joked to one of my male friends that I was “one cancer diagnosis away from being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” He appreciated the joke, and so did I, until it stopped being a joke and started being a cause for feminist concern.</p><p>In the past few years, a number of essays and blog posts have been made in feminist circles not only decrying the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope as demeaning to women (Which it is -- women don’t exist as character-building exercises for men. We exist as individuals.), but also worrying that by acting girlish, women are lessening the respect they command in personal and professional spheres (They do -- it’s hard to take a girl in a romper seriously.).&nbsp;</p><p>I agreed with all of these opinions. This infantilizing “Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ing” of women was wrong! To arms, ladies of the Internet! To arms!</p><p>…and then I became a regular contributor for Zooey Deschanel’s super-twee and wholesome and adorable website, <a href="http://www.hellogiggles.com">Hello Giggles</a>.&nbsp;</p><p>Initially, I submitted to the site under the guise of, “Oh, if I can get published there, I can expand the kinds of voices on the site and that’s great for feminism. To arms, ladies! To arms!” &nbsp;</p><p>When I finally was published, it became clear that I wasn’t different from the quirky girls -- I was and had always been one of them. I was a quirky girl and on top of that, I wrote really well to the hearts and minds of other quirky girls. Also, getting to write enthusiastically about the quirky things I liked was really, really fucking fun.</p><p>I know intellectually that it’s impossible for me to be a real “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” First of all, they’re not real. Not to mention, I very clearly have my own ambitions and agendas in life. Also, when aimless young men put me on some kind of dream girl pedestal because I know about Rogue Squadron, I get the heebie-jeebies and run away. I do not engage in any of those “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” relationships (which perhaps only further cements the similarities).</p><p>Still, reading backlash that Hello Giggles has received from so many men and women whose opinions I admired sent me into a panicked tailspin. Could I really be the type of woman whose very existence was demeaning to other women? I was in total identity crisis mode.&nbsp;</p><p>There’s this idea among pop culture pundits that the “quirky girl” aesthetic is designed to ensnare men by appearing weak. I don’t know what other so-called “quirky girls” are thinking. I just know that I’m blustering through my life.</p><p>Take my Hello Kitty credit card. I chose it because I went to the bank one day and my teller gave me a catalog of free design options. I had Hello Kitty, Precious Moments or a Boston sports team logo to choose from. Hello Kitty seemed the least weird to me at the time. Plus, cards with designs are easier for bartenders to find at the end of a long night.</p><p>And I do own a romper. In fact, I own a romper that buttons up the back so I sometimes need help going to the bathroom. But when I impulse -bought the romper&nbsp; at Bloomingdale's, I did it because I thought it looked cute. I was thinking, “I had a bad day and this makes me feel happy and summery.”</p><p>Star Wars, The Smiths, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons, obscure musical instruments like ocarinas, cats, Anne of Green Gables, wearing sundresses, dancing like a robot and eating candy are just things that I fucking like because I fucking like them. They make me happy to be alive.</p><p>I didn’t make these choices in my life so that I could ensnare dudes. I couldn't care less about that (OK, I could care a little bit less. Hey, I like dudes.). All of my "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" attributes are the direct result of growing up with social anxiety, an active imagination and an eccentric mother who taught me that I had the right to be as feminine or as masculine as I damn well pleased. </p><p>I shouldn’t have to feel embarrassed when a group of lady friends makes fun of my kitten-covered day planner, but I still do. The irony of this whole situation is that there’s this group of people who are claiming that my choices in life were made to please people, and now I find myself hating myself so as to please that group of strangers. When I’m going through my closet asking myself if I want to keep my romper, I can't decide if I've outgrown it or if I just think I have because people I admire mock the kinds of grown women who wear this garment.</p><p>In the end, I suppose I can only please myself. Quirks, commitment issues and all.</p>Everyone hates a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
http://www.xojane.com/relationships/i-m-afraid-i-m-manic-pixie-dream-girl
http://www.xojane.com/relationships/i-m-afraid-i-m-manic-pixie-dream-girlRelationshipsWed, 02 May 2012 07:00:26 -0700Meghan OIt Happened To Me: I Was on the Jury of a Murder Trial<!-- tml-version="2" --><p></p><div tml-image="ci01bb9038e0019512"><figure><img src="http://a3.files.xojane.com/image/upload/c_fill,cs_srgb,w_620/MTI0ODUxOTg3ODI4MTg5ODI3.png" /></figure></div><p></p><p>Not like this.</p><p>Jury duty.</p><p>The phrase alone fills the hearts of men and women alike with fear and loathing.Most people try to get out of jury duty. They'll claim that they can't miss school or they can't miss work or they're too racist to make a fair decision. A few years ago, I was called for jury duty, but I didn't try to wiggle out of it. I was young and naive and I was working a boring job at a boring company that offered full paid time off for jury duty.</p><p>So, when it was announced in the court room that the trial I was up for was an actual MURDER TRIAL, I was all, "Oh, please God, yes! Sign me up and strap me in! I want to go on a 3D ride through our nation's justice system! And I want paid time off away from my cubicle!"I was over-the-motherfucking-moon. I was living through something I had only ever seen on television. I was in an episode of "Law &amp; Order!" I couldn’t wait to call my mom how different murder trials were in real life Boston than they were on her then favorite drama, "Boston Legal." (Hint: there’s less William Shatner and more floor-to-ceiling wood paneling.)There was a moment in the first day of the trial when I was sitting in one of the jury box seats, watching the lead attorney pace up and down in front of us, drilling a forensics expert on the type of bullet that was used to kill the victim where my “OMG-I’m-in-the-jury-for-a-motherfucking-MURDER-TRIAL!” excitement reached a fever pitch. I felt a blush of excitement spread across my cheeks and I wanted to giggle in glee. Then the attorney asked the witness about the exact number of bullets found in the body and I checked myself. I reminded myself that I wasn't LARPing "Law &amp; Order." There were no men dressed up like Sam Waterston holding wizard canes objecting to evidence and no stern lady judges answering with sass, "Overruled." I was in the middle of a serious situation. A man had been murdered. Not in the exciting, thrilling, Hollywood movie definition of the word. A man had been murdered in the real sense of the word. His body had been broken by bullets and his family would never be able to see him again. Something unjust had occurred and now it was up to me and the rest of the jury to determine if the man on trial really committed this horrible crime. Our collective decision would forever alter not only the fate of the defendant, but of his family, his friends and the victims' loved ones. The actual trial was not that much like "Law &amp; Order." When you see justice doled out on television, all the boring parts are edited out. You don't have to listen to three different forensic analysts prove through scientific reasoning that the victim was shot with bullets and that's what caused his death and that yes, the victim is legally dead.</p><p>You don't have to listen to cops explain the protocol they have to follow when showing up to a hospital to determine that there's been a shooting crime, and yes, someone is actually dead.</p><p>You also don't have to wonder why the ADA decided to wear such an unflattering pantsuit because on "Law &amp; Order," none of the ADAs are ever wearing unflattering pantsuits.That said, there were some exciting moments.For instance, the one witness to the murder who was not a personal friend of the victim was a possible illegal immigrant who accused the court of bullying his initial statement out of him. He was also some sort of underground radio DJ, which seems like artistic flourish, but it was real life!</p><p>The defendant's mother emotionally described what it was like to see her son chased down by cops and I thought I was watching an Oscar-nominated film.</p><p>One day we even went on a field trip. Well, OK, they're called "field visits." The prosecution shoved us into a fancy coach bus and a police escort drove with us from downtown Boston to a neighborhood bar in Jamaica Plain that featured heavily in the prosecution's “murder story.”</p><p>A year later, some girl would walk up to my friends and I after a major street festival and invite us to an after party at that same bar -- and I had to yell at my friends why we could not go. (Because I knew that some people who drink there have gotten murdered.)Once the closing arguments were made, we were adjourned. It was clear that after six days of trial, the only facts we knew were that a man was shot and killed, the shooter was an averaged sized bald black man wearing a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants and that everyone who had been brought to the stand as a witness was probably lying about the details of the case.When I say that most of the witnesses were lying, I mean the real witnesses. The three forensic experts were probably telling the truth. All their stories about how the bullets entered the body at a certain angle were boring, but they seemed to match up. Also, I don't think the paramedics were lying about what time they arrived at the hospital with the victim. I actually don't even think the cops were lying because everything they said was very much about the procedure of law enforcement. There was no call for them to lie, and like I said, this wasn’t a television show.I felt very strongly, as did the other jurors, that all the people personally connected to the shooter, victim and crime scene were probably lying. They each had said on the stand that their earlier interviews with police were false or they refused to answer certain questions or they were just really shifty and squirmy. You couldn't trust any of their statements, especially because none of them matched up. All the testimonies that were supposed to matter were in fact worthless. It seemed to me that even though we knew the defendant was an average=sized bald black man who owned a white shirt and grey sweatpants, that statistically there were enough average-sized bald black men &nbsp;who owned that kind of generic outfit in that neighborhood that you couldn’t prove it was the same person.</p><p>I mean, if the suspect and defendant were both seven foot tall men with blue dreadlocks who wore glitter spacesuits that night, then perhaps I would have been convinced. Most of the jury agreed with this logic. Two people, however, said that he was guilty because "they felt it in their gut." These two people also admitted that they couldn't prove his guilt with fact.So, we found the defendant not guilty. Because, you know, in the United States of America, if you can't prove that a man's guilty, he's not supposed to be guilty.While I was in the room with the other jurors, I felt strong in my conviction that we couldn't convict a man with such slight amounts of evidence. I felt like a young Sally Field. You know, young and fresh, but morally righteous.</p><p>As soon as we were dismissed, I felt disgusted with myself. I had to live with the thought that I had possibly let a murderer walk free. I knew that convicting an innocent man without enough evidence was supposed to be a greater sin. However, throughout the entire trial I was left with the feeling that no matter what the jury decided, the victim's death would be avenged by his friends and family in some way or another.</p><p>You could surmise from all the broken testimonies that we couldn't use that the witnesses had a truer sense of what had happened, and that perhaps they had their own ways to deal with it.</p><p>I’m not even saying that the defendant did it, but that I thought the victim’s family knew who had and I was left with the worry that some sort of violent reckoning would occur far away from the marble courthouse.My best friend tried to cheer me up later by pointing out that I hadn't succumbed to racial stereotypes or that I had pulled off some Atticus Finch-like hoo-ha. She thought that I should pat myself on the back for not convicting a black man just because he was black, because as she pointed out, there are people who would sadly do that.</p><p>But I didn’t vote “not guilty” because I wanted to be some kind of post-racial girl scout. I voted “not guilty” simply because the prosecution hadn’t proved without a shadow of a doubt that he was guilty. I said “not guilty” because I was filled with doubt.Essentially, the trial felt worthless. It felt like I had just been called to put on a show to make the city of Boston feel better about its grip on justice. The 3D ride I wanted to take through America's justice system turned out to be a giant letdown.</p><p>The Boston City Courthouse should have a gift shop annexed off the front entrance, so that you when you leave jury duty you can buy a T-shirt that says, “I got to serve jury duty, and all I got was this lingering sense of doubt that sometimes keeps me up at night.”Well, I did also end up getting $100 from the State of Massachusetts for my service. So, there's I guess there’s that. </p>I got to serve jury duty, and all I got was this lingering sense of doubt that sometimes keeps me up at night.http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-me-i-was-jury-murder-trial
http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/it-happened-me-i-was-jury-murder-trialIt Happened To MeFri, 13 Apr 2012 08:00:20 -0700Meghan O